TgDaily, 20th July 2009

Chicago (IL) – On July 20, 1969 Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin become the first humans to land on the moon. Exactly 40 years later, you can simulate that experience, well almost, with footage released by NASA that has been integrated in Google’s Earth application. There is a new Moon section in Earth, which lets users explore the moon in a similar way as Earth.

While Google earth can hardly top the achievement in 1969, the new addition to Earth adds stunning image data to one of the most impressive applications available today. Users can select the “Moon view” from the main menu bar in Google Earth 5.0 and choose to either explore the Moon by themselves or use the prepared Apollo 11-17 guides to jump from mission to mission image data. There are enough panoramic “Street View” images, videos and text information to keep you glued to the screen for several hours.

“Today, on the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, Google is proud to announce the release of Moon in Google Earth, bringing you one step closer to understanding the experience of standing on the moon,” the company wrote in a statement. “It brings the Apollo stories out of the history books, recreating them in an immersive and interactive 3D environment.”

Besides the initial Apollo 11 mission, Moon also includes the six following missions, which are documented through pictures and text. Additionally, Google said it embedded video footage from Spacecraft Films “that covers the most well-known moments on the surface.” Users can even activate the Historical Maps layer to see maps that NASA used in the Apollo missions or go back in time and see the crash sites of test aircraft, such as ranger 9, which hit the surface in 1965.

If you already have Google 5.0, you can start exploring the Moon already. If you have an earlier version of the application, you can download Earth 5.0 here.